Today, the Government's chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson is expected to propose setting a minimum price for alcohol in order to curb binge-drinking.

The scale of this problem and its impact on the health service is indeed enormous. If you are unfortunate enough to end up in a hospital accident and emergency unit on a Saturday night, you will see a graphic illustration as you take your place in the queue behind a steady stream of drunken casualties.

Over the past decade, the number of NHS admissions of which alcohol was wholly or partly the cause more than doubled, along with the number of alcohol-related deaths.

Under the plan, no alcoholic drink would be sold for less than 50p per unit of alcohol that it contains

The health service spends more than £3billion each year on alcohol-related illness, which is now affecting ever-younger teenagers and children. But is setting a minimum price for alcohol really a sensible way of addressing this problem?

The idea is apparently that no alcoholic drink would be sold for less than 50p per unit of alcohol that it contains. The aim is to price alcohol out of the reach of those who are currently tempted by cheap booze offers and drink to excess as a result.

Irresponsible

But it would also mean that most bottles of wine could not be sold for less than £4, while the price of many 'own brand' beers would double.

The obvious objection is that this would punish the majority of moderate drinkers for the sins of the minority.

There is no doubt that the cheap price of alcohol has contributed to the phenomenon by putting such drinks within reach of more people. But price is surely only one element in this story.

The real reason why drinking has gone through the roof is the Government's irresponsible deregulation of alcohol, which has turned it into an everyday commodity.

There was a time not so long ago, after all, when supermarkets could sell alcohol only at certain restricted times of day - often in areas of the shop which were literally covered up for the rest of the time.

These restrictions were all swept away in the interests of the drinks industry, to which this Government - as with so many other examples of big business - has been unhealthily close.

Worse still, this industry has specifically targeted the young through the marketing of alcopops, which sweetened and promoted alcohol as if it were no more harmful - and far more trendy - than lemonade.

This has helped produce the catastrophic figure of one in four 11 to 15-year-olds drinking alcohol every week - and with a quarter of them reportedly imbibing the equivalent of at least seven pints of lager or 14 measures of spirits.

The drinks industry has also targeted women, with ever more cunning strategies to boost sales, such as replacing macho pub drinking-dens with fashionable and attractive open bars.

The result is that, according to official figures, the number of women drinking more than the recommended weekly limit of 14 units of alcohol has risen since 1989 by at least 70 per cent.

But the Government's role in this goes beyond letting the marketing of alcohol off the leash. With legislation six years ago handing local councils the lion's share of responsibility for licensing, the gatekeepers of alcohol use became compromised by a conflict of interest.

This is because councils wanting to regenerate their neighbourhoods believe that a thriving local nightlife and entertainment industry is essential - an approach ministers have encouraged.

Spurious

So they encouraged the growth of bars, pubs and all-night clubs. Residents who wanted to register a protest found their requests turned down - sometimes on obviously spurious grounds, such as the claim that they lived too far away, even where their homes were within 100yards of noisy venues.

Then there was the debacle of extending pub opening hours, on the basis that this would somehow turn us overnight into a model European cafe society where people drink only as an accompaniment to eating.

But Britain is not continental Europe, and in Britain there are those people who have always drunk alcohol in order to get totally plastered. So longer hours meant yet more disorder later in the night.

The power of the drink industry's influence was illustrated by the group of academics who advised ministers to extend pub opening hours - and who were themselves funded by more than 20 separate drinks and pub organisations.

In other words, the regulation system has effectively been rigged to favour an alcohol industry whose irresponsibility and cynicism this Government has systematically indulged.

Ministers, however, refuse to admit that their policy has been an abject disaster and, in large measure, is responsible for fuelling the explosion in problem drinking.

Indeed, not so long ago Sir Liam's own health department was fatuously insisting that the growth in treatment for drink-related injuries was due to the rise of new facilities such as walk-in centres.

The fundamental reason for the growth of binge-drinking is that New Labour is a responsibility-free zone.

It's hard to recall that in those dim and distant days when the Labour Party famously owed more to Methodism than to Marx, it believed that social justice meant actively encouraging people to behave well and discouraging them from behaving badly.

Accordingly, Labour politicians took measures to discourage such social evils as drinking, gambling and illegitimacy.

Yet these are the very areas where this Government has deliberately taken the brakes off - thus vastly increasing the harm done to both individuals and society from binge-drinking, gambling addiction and mass fatherlessness.

Idiotic

The reason for this is that when old-style state socialism became discredited - symbolised by Tony Blair's famous abolition of 'Clause Four', which opened the way to the embrace of free-market economics - progressives had no alternative reforming vision to put in its place.

The vacuum was filled by Left-wingers who had alighted upon a much more effective way of changing society and bringing people under state control.

This was to smash all the moral and social norms that previously policed and constrained irresponsible excesses. So illegitimacy was condoned, lone parenthood positively encouraged, and gambling and drinking deregulated - all in the name of 'individual choice'.

Progressives accordingly promoted the idiotic claim that the greatest harm was done not by destructive behaviour but by the stigma and regulations that once held it in check.

So in a House of Lords debate in 2002, the LibDem peer Baroness Walmsley declared: 'The greater the number of formal restrictions on drinking, the more alcohol-related problems a society has.'

Such a repudiation of moral responsibility meant ministers saw nothing wrong with climbing into bed with corporate lobbyists for the alcohol, gambling or family planning industries.

More invidious still, there were positive benefits from creating an ever-widening client state, with the burgeoning numbers of problem drinkers, gambling addicts and the myriad casualties of family breakdown creating a need for more and more therapists, counsellors and treatment agencies - whose workers, in turn, depended on the state for their livelihood.

The catastrophic results in the form of drunken violence and wrecked lives are now all around us.